Lvxferre

The userbase is small but stable.

Before watching the video:

No, English is not a creole by any sane definition. It’s a West Germanic language with some North Germanic and Romance influence, that’s it. This is clear when you look at creole languages typically…

1. having simpler and more regular phonology and using less contrast than the parent languages;
2. having simple syllabic structures, like CV or ©V;
3. breaking the comparative method once you try to apply it to them;
4. having grammars that typically look nothing like the ones of the parent languages.

Those are all consequences of how creoles originate: to keep it short [sloppy definition] they’re the result of speakers of 2+ languages interacting, with no side understanding the others’ language, but still reaching some compromise.[/sloppy definition] The phonology and syllabic structure get simpler because it’s typically what all sides can distinguish; the comparative method breaks because all the creole vocab is borrowed; and the grammar is something anew because it’s generalised from those ad hoc rules, as needed by the speakers. And this happens relatively fast.

In the meantime, look at English:

1. If anyone thinks that English phonology is “simple” or “regular”, look no further than the bloated vowel system. Typical for Germanic languages by the way.
2. The syllabic structure goes up to CCCVCCC (see: “strengths”).
3. You can backtrack a good chunk of the vocabulary all the way back into Proto-Indo-European, through the comparative method. Specially core vocab.
4. The grammar is basically Germanic. And even the differences from [say] Dutch or German don’t really fit periods with more interaction with other languages (such as the tribal invasion of Britannia, Danelaw, or the Norman rule), they’re gradual and better explained as the result of internal development, for example the noun case system kicking the bucket due to phonetic erosion.

That’s because English, like other non-creole languages, is the result of a somewhat stable linguistic community slowly changing their language over time. Stuff like the Norman conquest had some influence in the lexicon, but that’s it, it was just a Romance ruling caste eating “porc” and “mutton” while the huge majority of the population, the Germanic-speaking lower caste, was raising “pigs” and “sheep”.

I believe that this myth that English is a creole language is mostly caused by clueless people who look at a language as nothing but a collection of words, just like they would confuse an animal with its fur.

As I’m watching the video:

We already know that English borrows from everybody,

English is not even special in its propensity towards loanwords. Just look at Romanian or Japanese.

This picture is misleading as it implies that Germanic vocabulary in English was [all/mostly] borrowed, when it was mostly inherited.

Also, when it comes to Latin+Greek vocab, it ended in almost all European languages, not just English.

[Keisha Weil, PhD] Creole languages are basically languages that were created by different communities of speakers who came together and needed to interact with each other.

English already doesn’t fit the definition - since it’s trivial to show that it’s the result of Proto-Germanic slowly changing over time, not some sort of “creation” by different communities of speakers coming together.

(That said props to Dr. Weil, that’s a great way to explain this stuff to laypeople.)

[about pidgins]

A quicker way to explain pidgins is that they’re the sort of coarse communication used by speakers of different languages, when they want to finish a task and get over it, not really interested on anything past that. They typically have incomplete grammar, a small vocab, no native speakers.

And as the video mentions, pidgins can evolve into creoles, once speakers feel the need for more than just “finish it and get over it”; for example, once children start learning that pidgin as their native language and they want to express themselves. In this process the “gaps” of the incomplete grammar and vocabulary get filled, the phonology gets systematised, and you get an actual language.

extended pidgins

That’s mostly an intermediate category for a communication system that is already more developed than you’d expect from a pidgin, but still not a full-fledged language like a creole. I don’t think that it’s an useful concept, but that’s perhaps just me.

Why are they not teaching students in their home languages? [exemplified with Kreyòl]

[Dr. Weil] That’s a really good question. And I preface this with saying I understand why it’s not taught, even though I personally believe it’s wrong [to not teach in creole languages]. Creole languages, for most part, they’ve always been considered like a bad version of a European language. French, English, Dutch, those are real languages, where Haitian Kreyòl and Papiamentu and Jamaican Patois, because they’re so young, they’re not real languages yet.

Emphasis mine. It has barely anything to do with being a “new” or an “old” language; if it was an old language people would discriminate it another way, but the discrimination would be still there (like “it’s primitive” or “it’s just a dialect”, or worse), untouched.

It’s all about power. Languages piggyback on the power of their speakers, and languages associated with disempowered linguistic communities are often degraded into “this is not an actual language, it’s a bad version of [insert another language]”.

Here is where Dr. Weil could have inserted her talk about people of colour, and it would be extremely meaningful and accurate - because racial issues are one of the things disempowering the Kreyòl, Papiamentu etc. speakers, and creating this idiotic stigma behind creole languages.

Is English a creole language?

[Dr. Weil] Ah! I can guarantee you there’ll be other linguists who will tell you “no, English is not a creole language”. But when you ask them to break down why it’s not a creole language, is it because black and brown people are speaking that language, that makes it a creole language?

No, it isn’t. As I’ve explained at the start of this comment (and I’m glad to have done so before watching the video), a creole language has a different origin than a non-creole one.

Dr. Weil dropped the ball here.

We don’t call Montréal French a creole language.

Can someone informed on QC French argue for/against this point?

We don’t call Afrikaans a creole language.

Okay, that’s bullshit.

Afrikaans is outright called a creole language by at least some authors, such as Hein Willemse. Other authors - such as Hans den Besten - claim that it has a mixed creole origin. But academically speaking nobody relevant is trying to deny Afrikaans’ roots on Dutch-based creoles dammit.

Why are we not calling English creole languages? Because it [English] didn’t just pop out of some place, right? It didn’t just magically appear.

Why is she outright ignoring the definition of a creole language that herself provided, to lean into an “ackshyualy all languages are creoles” discourse??? Why??? Just to build a strawman and beat it to death???

In fact, do we even need the word “creole” as a descriptor to separate the languages out?

Yes if you want to talk about the origins of languages like Sranan, Kristang, and so many others. And talking about origins is important:

• it explains better why each of those languages has its own unique features;
• it explains the similarities between them;
• it highlights the history of colonialism, that made a lot of those languages to be;
• it gives their speakers a sense of belonging, because “here’s how my language was born” is part of their rightful linguistic identity;
• it gives linguists another window to look into Language - as the human faculty - through how those languages are formed.

We [people in general] should not be assigning a judgment of value over those varieties, as if they were inferior to non-creole languages. However that judgment would be still there even without the term, since their speakers are typically poor and non-white.

Or alternatively we can ditch the word so the prejudice against those creole languages surfaces under another disguise, while we wash our hands and pretend that we defeated that prejudice.

Some linguists, including Dr. Weil, are saying no.

Perhaps because she’s ignoring her own provided definition of a creole language to pretend that all languages originate the exact same way?

Yup, I got that you don’t mean that everyone is a bot there. I just don’t think that there aren’t so many of them as you’re saying; it’s certainly not as much as half the users, or even the activity (bots tend to be more active than actual users).

They’re still wrecking damage on the place though. Eventually they’ll reach a plateau in proportion, but their numbers will go down, alongside the actual users.

For real. Companies being extra pushy with their product always makes me picture their decision makers saying:

“What do you mean, «we’re being too pushy»? Those are customers! They are not human beings, nor deserve to be treated as such! This filth is stupid and un-human-like, it can’t even follow simple orders like «consume our product»! Here we don’t appeal to its reason, we smear advertisement on its snout until it needs to open the mouth to breath, and then we shove the product down its throat!”

Is this accurate? Probably not. But it does feel like this, specially when they’re trying to force a product with limited use cases into everyone’s throats, even after plenty potential customers said “eeew no”. Such as machine text and image generation.

The insertion of an all knowing checker who could have written it himself anyway

The checker does make all the difference, but he doesn’t need to be able to write it by himself. It could be even a brainless process, such as natural selection.

I think the point is less about any kind of route to Hamlet, and more about the absurdity of infinite tries in a finite space(time).

I know. It’s just that creationists misuse that metaphor so often that I couldn’t help but share my brainfart here.

Bots are parasites: they only thrive if the host population is large enough to maintain them. Once the hosts are gone, the parasites are gone too.

In other words: botters only bot a platform when they expect human beings to see and interact with the output of their bots. As such they can never become the majority: once they do, botting there becomes pointless.

That applies even to repost bots - you could have other bots upvoting the repost, but you won’t do it unless you can sell the account to an advertiser, and the advertiser will only buy it if they can “reach” an “audience” (i.e. spam humans).

Shorthand for third language [English] speaker. I mean that I’m prone to switch a few words here and there, due to other languages interfering inside my head.

This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly… repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)

Digg, right? Yeah. Perhaps spez even knew that it would repeat, but was smart (and shitty) enough to jump off the ship before it happened.

Perhaps even worse: Wobblesticke, Jiggleweapone, stuff like this.

If we’re considering even chimps “monkeys”, there’s already eight billion of them, I think that’s enough.

I have a way to make it work.

Have the monkey write down a single character. Just one. 29/30 of the time, it won’t be the same character as the first one in Shakespeare’s complete works; discard that sheet of paper, then try again. 1/30 of the time the monkey will type out the right character; when they do it, keep that sheet of paper and make copies out of it.

Now, instead of giving a completely blank sheet to the monkey, give them one of those copies. And let them type the second character. If different from the actual second character in Shakespeare’s works, discard that sheet and give him a new copy (with the right 1st char still there - the monkey did type it out!). Do this until the monkey types the correct second character. Keep that sheet with 2 correct chars, make copies out of it, and repeat the process for the third character.

And then the fourth, the fifth, so goes on.

Since swapping sheets all the time takes more time than letting the monkey go wild, let’s increase the time per typed character (right or wrong), from 1 second to… let’s say, 60 times more. A whole minute. And since the monkey will type junk 29/30 of the time, it’ll take around 30min to type the right character.

It would take even longer, right? Well… not really. Shakespeare’s complete works have around 5 million characters, so the process should take 5*10⁶ * 30min = 2.5 million hours, or 285 years.

But we could do it even better. This approach has a single monkey doing all the work; the paper has 200k of them. We could split Shakespeare’s complete works into 200k strings of 25 chars each, and assign each string to a monkey. Each monkey would complete their assignment, on average, after 12h30min; some will take a bit longer, but now we aren’t talking about the thermal death of the universe or even centuries, it’ll take at most a few days.

Why am I sharing this? I’m not invalidating the paper, mind you, it’s cool maths.

I’ve found this metaphor of monkeys typing Shakespeare quite a bit in my teen years, when I still arsed myself to discuss with creationists. You know, the sort of people who thinks that complex life can’t appear due to random mutations, just like a monkey can’t type the full works of Shakespeare.

Complex life is not the result of a single “big” mutation, like a monkey typing the full thing out of the blue; it involves selection and inheritance, as the sheets of paper being copied or discarded.

And just like assigning tasks to different monkeys, multiple mutations can pop up independently and get recombined. Not just among sexual beings; even bacteria can transmit genes horizontally.

Already back then (inb4 yes, I was a weird teen…) I developed the skeleton of this reasoning. Now I just plopped the numbers that the paper uses, and here we go.

And we need more of them!

I’m not expecting a big exodus, but rather a slow decline in both the number of users and their engagement. With a few peaks here and there that seem to revert the downwards trend, but each peak being smaller than the one before.

They won’t be leaving for the same reason as most people here did, pissed at the IPO-related changes (such as killing 3rd party apps). It’ll be more like “…meh, why would I check Reddit? There’s better stuff elsewhere.” We can already see the decline of the content quality in Reddit now; it’ll get only worse over time.

I think that most will end in Discord. Some in Bluesky, and some will simply touch grass. Conservatives might end in Minitrue “truth social” or crap like that.

Facebook might perhaps absorb some of the former Reddit users. It feels disgusting for the privacy conscious, but for them it’ll be a simple matter of not finding interesting stuff in Reddit.

The same applies to Reddit’s liquid profit - for now, that value extraction still creates a small peak on raw profit, to the point that the bottom line became positive; later on the peak will barely reach the surface; later on, value extraction will be necessary to avoid making the bottom line too negative.

I think that most users there are still human beings, but botting has become a big enough problem that the platform can’t be seen as a place for genuine content any more.

Yup, it is 100% relevant! Selling user data is extremely profitable, specially with a large userbase. However, it lowers the value of the platform - it makes users less eager to genuinely contribute with it (due to privacy concerns, seeing it as a “they’re exploiting me!” matter, etc.). As such the data being generated there becomes less useful, less relevant, and less profitable over time, paradoxically enough.

I fucked it up and switched the terms, sorry. Look for “value extraction” instead; you’ll find multiple references to the concept such as this or Mazzucato’s “The Value of Everything”.

To keep it short: you create value when you produce desirable goods/services for the customers; however, when you extract it, you’re picking the value that was already created (by society, your customers, or even your own business) and turning it into profit. The later is faster but unsustainable, as that value doesn’t pop up from nowhere, so when a business shifts from value creation to value extraction it’ll get some quick cash and then go kaboom.

In Reddit’s case, this value is mostly users willing to generate, curate, and share content with the platform, and other users knowing this:

• someone recommends you a product/brand. The person might be wrong, but you were reasonably sure that they aren’t a corporation astroturfing their own product. Someone else might criticise it instead.
• you hop into your favourite subreddit and, while the content there isn’t the best, it’s still good enough - because the mods gave some fucks about growing their subreddits;
• you discuss some controversial topic. You might get dogpiled, but at least you know that the dogs piling you are human beings, that sometimes might listen to reason; a bot will never;
• et cetera.

All that value was being slowly extracted through the last years, but the changes in 2023/2024 did it the hardest.

As I often mention in other communities, this smells like value exploitation extraction* from a distance. Value exploitation extraction typically generates a peak of profit in the short term, but it makes losses even harsher in the long run.

As such I don’t think that Reddit is getting “bigger”. That profit is like someone who lives in a wooden house, dismantling their own home to sell it as lumber; of course they’ll get some quick cash, but it’s still a bad idea.

In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature.

Let’s pretend for a moment that we can totally trust Huffman’s claim here. Even human translations often get some issues, as nuances and whatnots are not translated, and this generates petty fights, specially in a younger userbase like Reddit’s; with AI tendency to hallucinate, that gets way worse. And even if that was not an issue, a lot of content is simply irrelevant for people outside a certain regional demographic.

*EDIT REASON: I switched the terms, sorry. (C’mon, I’m L3.)

Kind of. @storksforlegs@beehaw.org is right that journalistic standards prevent too much meddling. Plus commercial news defending interests have a better resource for manipulation - instead of lying, they pick which true pieces of info to release as relevant, and paint them one or another way.

For example. Let’s say that Alice insults Bob, and Bob slaps Alice in return. Someone defending Alice would say that she was the victim of aggression, while someone defending Bob would say that he reacted to Alice’s verbal abuse. Neither is false, but they don’t get the full picture. While LLM/A"I" style bullshit be saying instead “Alice picked a puppy and beat it to death with Bob’s face”.

Any outlet accepting the deal should be immediately put into a list of sites spreading disinformation and potentially harmful content.